Christmas Cheer and the Like

Vignettes of winter time.

In the English building, turning in our final papers of the semester, Boy and I ran into one of the drivers of our campus van service, The Ride. His name was Mark and he was trying to turn in a paper for a girl who is on crutches, and would have had a terrible time getting up the stairs. He couldn't find the offices he was looking for, he was confused, we said we'd turn in the paper. He was so surprised and grateful, and I thought how funny it is that the people who are the friendliest and most willing to go out of their way for others are often the most surprised when it is done in return. We had to wander back and forth between a few buildings before we decided how best to hand in the paper, and on our way back we passed the same Ride van. Mark-the-Ride-driver slowed down and opened his window to thank us again, and the girl on crutches, who was in the passenger seat, thanked us too. It was all so classical holiday heartwarming. And it felt just like it was supposed to.

Christmas dinner. My family has a flexible tradition. We always eat roast beef with some good, rich gravy. We always have mashed potatoes. We usually have peas, but this year, my mom branched out. She blanched tiny haricot verte till they were just tender and still snapping fresh, and set them aside. When the beef was mostly done, she cooked onions and cored plum tomatoes and garlic slices in butter and olive oil and a little butter till the tomatoes were just beginning to get mushy at the edges and lose their skins, and the onions were getting translucent. Then she added the beans back in and heated on low, tossing it till it was mixed together and warmed through. They were, of course, delicious, the onions and tomatoes silky and rich, the green beans crunchy and fresh tasting, all of it bound together by the flavor of the garlic.

Her switch from tradition gave me comfort, because it is my task to make a dessert, and I had decided to change things up, too. Generally we have some sort of cake for dessert. In the past several years it has mostly been a cake that is composed of a layer of chopped fresh cranberries on the bottom covered with a rich, buttery golden layer of cake on top. It is easy and wonderful, but I made it at Thanksgiving and I was looking for something new. I had seen something interesting over at Jefferson's blog a while back. It was a simple idea: take one ripe pomegranate. Remove all the seeds and put them into a pretty bowl (I chose a dark blue one with a faint pattern of leaves), making sure there isn't any white skin clinging to them. Over this, grate dark chocolate, the darker the better (mine was 60% cacao Ghiradelli baking chocolate). Stir to combine. I didn't remember if it said to let it sit, but I did, because it was easier. I didn't remember if it said to add any liquour, but I decided to toss in a teaspoon of Calvados, which added just a little complexity to the flavor. I didn't remember any serving suggestions, so when I planned this I came up with my own. Last night I put together the custard base for vanilla ice cream, using whole vanilla beans for the first time outside of a restaurant. I chilled it in the fridge overnight, spun it this afternoon and firmed it in the fridge. The vanilla flavor couldn't be beat, but I left it a little over long freezing, and froze it in the wrong container, so it ended up a little too icy for my tastes. Still, in blue bowls with the garnet jewel pomegranate seeds spooned over it, it looked beautiful and tasted fresh, complex and delicious.
My family loved it. I wasn't really afraid they wouldn't... but I bought a bag of cranberries, just in case.

I am at home. I am missing Boy, who is in Dallas with extended family. I am feeling peaceful and a little dreamy, like I always do when I visit the home where I grew up. I am reading fantasy novels again, taking long showers, seeing old friends. I will focus on work for the semester only a little bit, and then go back to hiding from it for my reunion with Boy and college friends and the East Coast.

Christmas in my family is a sacred day, but not because of any particular religious affiliation. It's a time of family traditions, as mentioned above, a day when even when my sister didn't get along with my parents and my parents hadn't gotten enough sleep because they were up late wrapping and I got everybody up at 8:00 am, everybody in the family was patient and nice to each other. My family has only two present giving occasions a year, Christmas and Birthdays, and so we each get quite a few presents, mostly small things along the lines of books, articles of clothing, perhaps a piece of jewelry. We unwrap and oggle, and then mom and I cook and Dad cleans up and my sister goes off somewhere of her own. We reconvene for dinner, we read or nap or walk. In the evenings we often watch a movie, sometimes out, this year my mom's new "Planet Earth" dvds. We admire and congratulate each other on our tree, laden with ornaments even far back on it's branches, with glass icicles and butterflies attached with wires and tinsel and gold and scarlet beads and tiny white lights. It is perhaps the most overdone christmas tree on the planet, and we love it more every year.

Today has been a peaceful, joyful, happy day for me. I hope it has been for all of you, and I wish you all many more in the future.

It's good, when winter is cold and the sky is gray, that there is an excuse for all of us to cuddle in doors, be extra nice to each other, play with new toys, eat delicious food, and love.

Catching up I: Love and Adrenaline

I have been remiss in posting. Don't think nothings been going on. Rather, it's been going on so fast I couldn't possibly keep up. Now I'll try to get it all into words, bit by bit.

The first major thing has already been posted about by my good friend and newcomer to the blog-o-bandwagon, Mischief. It just so happens that Boy has access to a large space with a grid in it. It also just so happens that he has way too much in the way of rigging supplies. And it just so happens that he, myself, Mischief and Mischief's lovely play partner, Estra all had a bit of a break in our finals madness on the same evening.
Estra had never been up, and it's a pity. The girl is so slight and charming, with the biggest smile and the sweetest face and a cute little boy-short haircut, it might be worth considering that she's what the fairies left when they took away some human child. She is adorable and amazing (and also ridiculously intelligent, and amazingly kind, and I more or less just can't get over how great this girl is). It was pretty clear that this fairy needed to fly.
And I happened to have a pair of pixie wings just, y'know, lying around.
We rigged her up in pretty red and orange rope, with pixie wings on her back, and hung her from our suspension ring, which was on a cable at least 10 feet long, which was chained to the grid. Mischief took her hand and ran her around like you would lead a pony around the ring, and she flew with her bright blue-green wings. Mischief wore his sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, and he looked just like a little gnome, to me. They made me smile from head to toe, and they were all smiles as well.
It is such a pleasure to put people in the air for the first time, or even the second or third. It's such fun to be up, and I love more than anything being able to share that with people.

And that is not even what this post is about. Because after we'd taken the glowy Estra down so she and Mischief could retreat to a corner and cuddle, Boy put me up. Estra had been face down in a very basic suspension, but I much prefer to be face up, so we rigged it like that. Now, we discovered, again, that a harness that works excellently for a face down or sideways suspension does not work so well for a face up suspension. We were using a really great harness we'd learned from the inestimable David Lawrence at his advanced rope work class at Floating World, and for what it's good for it's the best we've come across, but because of its configuration, it works less well for how weight distributes in a face up suspension.
But, we worked around it.
And we did something we've never done before. Something we can't do on the hardpoint in my room, or on the hard points in frames. Something that was space specific and amazing.
I swung. My body described a circle 15 feet in diameter, perhaps 6 feet off the floor. I swung back and forth and to the sides. Boy pushed me this way and that and I was so terrified I couldn't do anything but laugh. I was so happy. We've never had the space to do that before, but I love momentum. I love to swing on things, or to fall and be caught. It is one of the most exhilarating, amazing experiences I can imagine. I adore it. And this was the first we'd ever really explored that. What a way to start, right? And to know through all of this that I was held by a suspension ring, by climbing webbing and a climbing swivel and a big thick chain a cable nearly half an inch thing and climbing, locking carabiner and of course, good rigging done with Monk's good hemp rope (though soon, we'll be doing it with ours. Boy's been going through the slow and many stepped process of treating 300 feet of 6mm hemp).
In short, it was more like flying than anything I've ever done.
What it felt like, actually, was those rides at fairs and carnivals where you swing around in chairs. But I hadn't just paid and got on a ride. I had the amazing knowledge that the entire thing had been constructed especially for me, that this was my ride, my flight. And then I swung, and swung, and was caught and gathered in to Boy's arms and stroked and kissed and swung again by the same boy who had put me up, who had rigged this spectacular ride just for me. I have rarely felt so special and so loved.

He took me down, eventually. I didn't want to come down, but it's a dumb idea to wait until you really want to come down, because by that time it's hard to get down fast enough. He took me down and we packed up all the rope and went home and I believe I made quesadillas that night, still aglow.

There are a couple of pictures, but they are mostly of Estra and Mischief, and are therefore not mine to post. But if you use your imaginations, you should be able to see me, swinging through the air and bubbling with laughter, my hair streaming, my hands either flexing open or closed or grasping the ropes that attached me to the ceiling. Full of love and adrenaline.

Snow, Study, and New Things That Are Not Really New

We are in finals studying and paper writing time here in my neck of the collegiate world, and it is amazingly pleasant. Today I advertised my room as a place to write or study, and from the time I settled down at about 3:00 in the afternoon until this very moment, when I have knocked of but Boy and our friends have not, I have had pleasant, studious company here. Through most of the day, and all of last night, snow fell in small soft flakes, accumulating high enough to slip into the tops of ankle boots. The snow outside my windows made it that much more wonderfully cozy here in my study pit.

The denizens of the den of sin are not so much, today.

Last night, though, there was a little mini scene. A practice scene, if you will. Boy and I have been doing those: scenes which work pretty well, but don't really click, in which one or the other or both of us tries to pick up skills we have not used in a while. Recently Boy attempted his first honest-to-goodness Topping-and-Domming scene in recent memory. He tied me up in a few positions, did some stuff... it didn't really work, because I didn't remember how to give up control any better than he knew how to take it, but it wasn't unpleasant and it opened the door. We haven't done a proper scene with him in charge since, but the mood has changed. I have been able to trust that he can take care of me in a way I hadn't in a while.
To return to last night: it was simple. It was basic. Except for the Florentine flogging. That was exciting. I have been practicing it for quite a while, and this is the first time I had used it in a scene context. It worked just fine. And I got back into the mode of using toys, of hitting him, which he had needed.

We're exploring the use of safewords. Well, actually, what's happening is that Boy has discovered, or perhaps rediscovered, a love of begging and not getting. He discovered this first a long, long time ago, when our version of D/s was getting together to get each other off. This we always did by the tried and true Oral Sex method, and we got so that we could halt each other on the brink of orgasm. Over and over again. I remember the elated feeling the first time he begged me to come, and I remember the glorious light bulb that turned on in my head when he gently informed me that I didn't have to say Yes. He likes not to get what he wants. He likes, these days, to beg me to stop hurting him, and he likes it when that makes me hurt him more. For me, this is a little difficult, but I'm getting into it. It really does pull the power exchange out into the open. This boy lets me hit him, on my terms. I can wale on him just to get out my frustration with the day, till my arms are tired and his back is bruised and he's chanting "stopstopstopleasestop", and that'll leave him cuddling into my belly, thanking me profusely and grinning like a fool.
Once I get used to that, a girl could get used to that.

More updates as procrastination, and I'll leave you with a question I need answered:
I recently changed the title of this blog to reflect what I want it to be: a journal of my observations on life and my adventures with Boy (and his observations on such, should he choose to put them here). Also about kink, often and even mostly about kink, but not such that I should feel bad about posting the rest of the world in here, too. And yet, my URL remains eyehooksandleather (.blogspot.com). We have since nabbed up the URL switchandboy (.blogspot.com), which better reflects the blog, but I don't know if it'll be a pain for all of you to have to find your way to a new address. What if I loses my readership? I will DIE without my VAST and ADORING readership.

Seriously. To move or not to move? This is the question.

Thoughts and Such

I wanted to write an entry about The Great Dirt Disaster, or: How I Can Hold Domliness Better Than My Curtain Rod Can Hold Plants, but that's about the entirety of the interesting bit. I also did dirty things to Boy, but I do that a lot.
In fact, we've recently been coming to terms with exactly how much I do that. Too much. Not because I could ever have too much of scritching my puppy or beating my Boy, but because I am a switch, dammit. I like to be submissive too. I think. To be honest, this year we've been doing far fewer scenes than we liked, and the majority of them, I've been topping. So much so that I have no idea how to give up control anymore, how to trust Boy as in charge and in control of the scene. It's combined with feeling a terrible need to be taken care of, and not knowing how to let myself be. And with not knowing whether or not Boy even really wants to dominate me at all, or knows how to or cares about comforting me, or, or, or.
I have been getting trapped and confused in my head, and it's icky and disgusting. And of course, as long as it's been since I subbed, it's been that long since Boy Dommed. So he spends lots of time looking at pictures of tied up girls, and pointing out girls he'd like to tie up, and he is very pleased whenever some sweet little thing calls him sir, and I get all grumpy because I feel like he doesn't want that from me anymore.
Which I'm sure isn't true, but I've been so Big recently that it must be hard to see me as Little. And he's used to being Little with me, and so of course he's having trouble being Big.
The problem, is that of the two of us, I'm the more pro-active. Solving interpersonal problems is what I do. I give advice that is not solicited, I poke my nose where it's probably not wanted, and when I think some part of my relationship needs fixing, by gum, I try to fix it!
But, I can't make him feel Toppy. I can't make him Dom me. I can't even make him see me as Little... half the time when I try to be Little, the part of him that's Little gets jealous and before I know it I'm giving him scritches. Which is wonderful and comforting, but generally not what I am going for.
The past two nights I've tried to orchestrate scenes in which I am, if not submissive, at least bottoming. I got my back beaten till I called stop one night, and I got tied up and messed with another, but it didn't work. What I want has to come from inside him. I can only help by changing my self.
I can try to be Little and cute and submissive, but that leaves me vulnerable, and if he doesn't respond then I've lowered my defenses for no reason. It is no fun to be little without somebody to be big, and I'm not really willing to risk it.
So what do I do?
Nothing, I guess. Do the Toppy scenes I've got in mind for him, hope that playing that way is better than not playing at all and we will be set on the right track. Hope that the escalating nature of or switchy relationship will get back, and someday he will plan something wicked for me.
To top it all off, I think I'm PMSing.

So, here is the other problem: I have had the terrible good luck of making friends. Friends who are into Kink. Friends who have blogs. Friends who READ THIS BLOG.
And the thing is, this is only sort of a blog about kink in general, and only sort of a blog about the world at large. Really, it's a blog about my relationship. The good and the bad and the dirty. And I do about 97% of the writing, which means that it's terribly one-sided. And while I'm fine with y'all knowing how loud Boy screamed that last time I pegged him, I don't know how I feel about your knowing every time we have a fight. The ins and outs and ups and downs are confusing and difficult enough for us to handle, let alone you. I don't want to get sad comments every time I write a post that looks like this one. I don't want to have to explain whether or not Boy and I are really on the outs this time. We probably aren't. We haven't been so far.

Anyhow. Boy is sitting here kissing me and I don't want him to stop, but it's hard to write and kiss at the same time.
And also, he came and gave me scritches behind the ear without my having to do anything much in particular except butt at him in the shoulder with my head, so probably all will be just perfect in a bit.

It tends to be.

Fame

What is Fame, in the World of Kink?
I'd venture to say we have a few stars and superstars. I'd also venture to say that ever person asked would count some different people. For me, the are the Big Names I heard about as I began getting in to the scene. So Fetish Diva Midori is a kinky super star to me. As is B. Harrington, Mistress Matisse, and the author of the blog (and creator of the rope) that started it all: Twisted Monk.
He may not know he's a celebrity, but he is.
I know that he reached true celebrity status in my life, because on a long drive home last night, Boy used him as his answer in a game of Animal-Vegetable-Mineral. Not him, actually. His blog.
I think that blogs should not be legal, as they most certainly don't fit into either of the three categories. But it's ok. I got him back with a virus.
Anyhow, about Monk:
See his blog! See it now. See it here.
I am famous too, now.
Thanks, Monk.


(P.S. Tied Boy up and pegged him last night. He begged me to stop and not to stop at the same time. That is just so adorable, I have to say. Hooray, rope!)